That's the
word for it. Peace.' With this profession of faith, the doctor,
who was an old jail-bird, and was more sodden than usual, and had
the additional and unusual stimulus of money in his pocket,
returned to his associate and chum in hoarseness, puffiness, red-
facedness, all-fours, tobacco, dirt, and brandy.

Now, the debtor was a very different man from the doctor, but he
had already begun to travel, by his opposite segment of the circle,
to the same point. Crushed at first by his imprisonment, he had
soon found a dull relief in it. He was under lock and key; but the
lock and key that kept him in, kept numbers of his troubles out.
If he had been a man with strength of purpose to face those
troubles and fight them, he might have broken the net that held
him, or broken his heart; but being what he was, he languidly
slipped into this smooth descent, and never more took one step
upward.

When he was relieved of the perplexed affairs that nothing would
make plain, through having them returned upon his hands by a dozen
agents in succession who could make neither beginning, middle, nor
end of them or him, he found his miserable place of refuge a
quieter refuge than it had been before. He had unpacked the
portmanteau long ago; and his elder children now played regularly
about the yard, and everybody knew the baby, and claimed a kind of
proprietorship in her.

'Why, I'm getting proud of you,' said his friend the turnkey, one
day. 'You'll be the oldest inhabitant soon. The Marshalsea
wouldn't be like the Marshalsea now, without you and your family.'

The turnkey really was proud of him. He would mention him in
laudatory terms to new-comers, when his back was turned. 'You took
notice of him,' he would say, 'that went out of the lodge just
now?'

New-comer would probably answer Yes.

'Brought up as a gentleman, he was, if ever a man was. Ed'cated at
no end of expense. Went into the Marshal's house once to try a new
piano for him. Played it, I understand, like one o'clock--
beautiful! As to languages--speaks anything. We've had a
Frenchman here in his time, and it's my opinion he knowed more
French than the Frenchman did. We've had an Italian here in his
time, and he shut him up in about half a minute. You'll find some
characters behind other locks, I don't say you won't; but if you
want the top sawyer in such respects as I've mentioned, you must
come to the Marshalsea.'

When his youngest child was eight years old, his wife, who had long
been languishing away--of her own inherent weakness, not that she
retained any greater sensitiveness as to her place of abode than he
did--went upon a visit to a poor friend and old nurse in the
country, and died there. He remained shut up in his room for a
fortnight afterwards; and an attorney's clerk, who was going
through the Insolvent Court, engrossed an address of condolence to
him, which looked like a Lease, and which all the prisoners signed.

When he appeared again he was greyer (he had soon begun to turn
grey); and the turnkey noticed that his hands went often to his
trembling lips again, as they had used to do when he first came in.

But he got pretty well over it in a month or two; and in the
meantime the children played about the yard as regularly as ever,
but in black.

Then Mrs Bangham, long popular medium of communication with the
outer world, began to be infirm, and to be found oftener than usual
comatose on pavements, with her basket of purchases spilt, and the
change of her clients ninepence short. His son began to supersede
Mrs Bangham, and to execute commissions in a knowing manner, and to
be of the prison prisonous, of the streets streety.

Time went on, and the turnkey began to fail. His chest swelled,
and his legs got weak, and he was short of breath. The well-worn
wooden stool was 'beyond him,' he complained. He sat in an arm-
chair with a cushion, and sometimes wheezed so, for minutes
together, that he couldn't turn the key. When he was overpowered
by these fits, the debtor often turned it for him.
'You and me,' said the turnkey, one snowy winter's night when the
lodge, with a bright fire in it, was pretty full of company, 'is
the oldest inhabitants.